Would It Be a Disaster If Ubuntu Ceased to Exist?

Over the past few years Ubuntu has become somewhat divided from the rest of the Linux community and it could easily be renamed “Linux Marmite,” as you either love it or hate it.

A number of reasons are often cited for disliking Ubuntu. Top of the list seems to be Unity. I maintain that Unity is a really good desktop environment. I spent some time working with it and I find it incredibly intuitive but my view of Unity is in the minority. I think that people coming to Linux for the first time and choosing Ubuntu as their distribution of choice will probably not be as put off by the experience as users that were brought up on Gnome 2.

Collaboration and the spirit of togetherness also appears to be a reason to dislike Ubuntu and the MIR-versus-Wayland argument seems to have made the divide between Linux user and Ubuntu user even greater. From a Linux user’s point of view though, why do we care whether Ubuntu uses MIR and whether all other distributions use Wayland? As a user of an operating system, do I care how the windows are displayed on the screen? Surely as long as they work properly then there isn’t a problem.

Wayland versus MIR is surely an issue for software developers, not for people who use the software. Most users who move to Linux from Windows aren’t going to care about MIR or Wayland. The graphical desktop is either going to work or it isn’t; they aren’t going to care about the display server that the desktops sit on top of. If the desktop doesn’t work, then the user is either going to try another Linux distribution or they are going to revert back to Windows.